Finding Ourselves in Others and Others in Ourselves

Life has been so elusive lately, shrouded in ends with not many beginnings. Today I decided it was time to connect. I found a new blogger online whom I met by butting into her group's conversation at Barnes & Noble. I liked her and her group, who enthusiastically proposed she blog. Their support was notable, as these people were strangers who became friends, simply by talking. I know. How archaic, how untech-like, how magical is that! So, I reconnected with her via her blog and hope to see her and her compadres in virtual and real space soon. Life is short and connection is why we are here, in part. The other part is up to each of us; the What and the How and the When and the Where. Quite simply, our tasks and who we choose to do them with. Over time, gradually, I have been choosing solitude for writing and creativity for connection. Of the two, I prefer connected creativity. The rhetoric has been so hostile, the unity has been fragmenting, and so it is time to place beauty and connection back into life. My connection theme lately has been a project I am calling-Taking Flight. It is a creative focus on how all of us who live in the United States, came from somewhere else. In short, we are all refugees here. At some moment in our ancestry and heritage, someone took flight. They came from there to here with a leap of faith and a dream. I am interested in what propels people in their lives to seize that moment, like my new-found blogger friend Laura. What propelled her and her group to start a discussion and take flight into friendship? What propelled her to write in a public way and take flight into being heard? What gives us lift, and makes us soar? If we know how it was done in our families, through transgenerational wisdom, we can learn how to do it in ourselves. The truth is, we all have taken flight too, from somewhere bad to somewhere better, and I am so interested in that momentum, which is healing.

The side bar has pictures of feathers, that are the start of Taking Flight, which was launched at the annual Refugee Summit in my state. The work will be to help people contemplate what gave them strength to make needed changes in their lives, what is their ancestral story of immigration, and what is their familial source of resilience through risk to empowerment? If we can answer the questions, we can soar. Taking Flight involves creation of paper feathers that hold words, phrases, sentences or even paragraphs to remind us of our unique sources of empowerment. The feathers will be created and hung on an Indra's web to bring the creators into unity. The web will showcase the feathers at the juncture of vertical and horizontal threads, while a log will capture the stories. I hope the project will travel around the nation to inspire our original strengths of unity, diversity, and innovation in the sharing of the heritage of many, among us all. I hope the project turns a pat rhetoric of hate into a spirit of create.
Take a look at the photos and see if you are inspired to join in. There is no wrong way to create a feather except to not create one. A website on this project will be coming soon.

Terra Mar for Terra Cultura

Make America Great. A mindless campaign slogan, simply because America already is great. However, in the last two years, we have lost the stateliness of Unity. We seem to have lost a sense of We and gained a sense of US versus them. It makes me contemplative. It also makes me very aware that if we find a true sense of We, then we must offer immediate praise, participate in the We, and celebrate the We that is found. 

I was so grateful recently, to have a small troupe of dedicated and intentional activists for community contact me to ask if I had something to donate to their cause. Their cause is a true sense of We. They are creating Terra Cultura-a hub for teaching about sustainable living through community, housing, agriculture and the arts among other passions that they bring to the farm table. Great!! 
I knew I needed to find something to donate.

Since sustainable often means "to keep in existence," I ran to a thrift store to see what I could find to keep in existence. At the African Alliance, I found a white girl. A Greek to be specific. Her head to be exact. Maybe she was Athena or maybe even Helen of Troy. She was chalky white. She reminded me of a goddess and an oracle. I painted her in terracotta to honor the Greek polychrome tradition. I christened her Terra Mar to honor Terra Cultura and to bring in the sea, the keeper of ancient beginnings.  Her spirit was given a Kōan I had written to invite contemplation of beginnings, struggles, and results. The invitation was to contemplate the Kōan: "The pearl forms, in a struggle, with the sand." It actually also forms in a struggle with a parasite, but that's another story and an appropriate coincidence for our current times. Terra Mar became an oracle, when her Kōan was written on a tag. Soon, other tags followed with random words for meditation, practices for inspiration, and questions for contemplation. The tags were placed in a shell, which fits behind her head for seekers to find and use. She became a Book Arts project.

I could never quite photograph her, as she seemed to elude my camera. If you, her owner, reads this, please post a picture of her in the comments. Otherwise, readers will find her in chalky white, under construction, in the sidebar, and her final state is left to our shared imaginations. In the end, she had a crown of shells, sea glass, and pebbles; carrying the earth and sea together along with our detritus of glass.  She auctioned off in a bidding war, which made me smile. I knew she would find her owner. She claimed him before he even knew he had been found. Such is the way with oracles. May we all now reclaim our sense of the community of We. May we support non-profits like Terra Cultura to carry the sense of unity inside. May they continue strong.

To read more about Terra Cultura, which is coming soon to a real and virtual landscape near you, please follow this link: https://terracultura.org/

 

Ironic Butterfly Takes Flight

This blog is a bit like whispering into space for me. I rarely write, and creativity has been scraping an empty barrel lately. That said, I found it a bit ironic that my last post in November had a butterfly winging its way to freedom as part of the found freedom in the anniversary of the destruction of the Berlin wall. The irony, of course, was that my first creative jaunt back was to decorate a butterfly. Decorating with the 13 layer collage technique is addictive to me, as it starts with a tabula rasa of gesso. Then, that layer gets textured in any way that is pleasing to the hands and eye. Then we add in colors, as many or as little as needed; like a recipe, they are chosen to our taste. The colors soon start to disappear with image addition, then that all starts to blur as we stamp with found objects in ink and paint and then do the same with stamps. Will all those additions to image and texture, we add blur; blending in edges with tissue or textured paper or fluffing them out with white paint. Then, time for the fluid acrylics. They are like a pepper or pungent spice that make or break the whole piece. Using them almost stops my heart, and I stand at the ready with a wet rag to mop up destruction. At some level, though, the fluid is the part that forces us to let go...of expectations, and plans, of areas of beauty, and even of parts destroyed; to let go and trust that the process will carry us on. Once the fluids are down, it is time for a hint of transfer in gold or copper or opalescence. Then perhaps, writing goes down or else assemblage. Finally the edge is done all around, in a boundary color like Payne's Gray.  The technique is acquired and refined over time.

I am so very glad I learned it, simply to take a writing class with Nick Bantock in 2009.  He, quite correctly, used to make the writers do art and the artists write. Clever to engage the quiescent brain, as it has so much to say. The process is the heart of the art. It draws you in, and time flows effortlessly without any notice of its passing. The process is an enraptured state; watching for what is beautiful and harmonious and noting what keeps emerging. The emergence of the horses in this piece was profound for me and unconsidered until the piece was done. I suddenly found myself contemplating the losses of two other horses in 2012 and 2014, which broke my heart. Here suddenly are spirit horses...out of nowhere, out of somewhere. Their arrival startled me as did the odd image of a young horse head starting to emerge at the base of the right wing horse's neck. That was not an image at all, but rather a creation that came out of some juncture of inking and stamping and texturing all on its own. It came out of the intersection of the I-Thou relationship, which is necessarily out of spirit. Art comes up at you, just like that.

So, I will now watch for a young horse, perhaps one is growing older as we speak, just for me. I notice how much Lost Shoe cabin came in- literally in bits and pieces from its grounds and in content with the horses who would have drawn the logs up the mountain and the single boot that predated the one that was lost in the cabin's construction. Lost Shoe was the colors and a whisper of the West in this piece. The word California was found in the ripped shreds pile, along with a notation about water resources, just as we ration and go through our worst drought. Spirit, ever present, ever mysterious. So, here to the right is White Horses at Lost Shoe, my mixed media collage donated to the Butterfly Effect, an art for social change organization that drops the butterfly in a public scavenger hunt and then gifts the finder's favorite charity with $250 dollars. The process unfolds down the pane as it did across time spurts over a few weeks. A process of joy and gratitude and expanding blessings.
For more on the butterfly project, see: www.butterflyeffectbethechange.com

Walls Around Hearts, Waiting to Be Torn Down

It's been 25 years. 1 death zone. Divided people. Misery for the better part of 28 years. The 2 concrete barriers, dividing sides, with the infinity of an 8 turned upwards toward one sky; imploring faith to step in and end the divide. It kept people away from their brethren and kin, entrenched in a place without many choices, on both sides of the walls. The walls kept hearts apart, with the empty zone between; leaving a rent in the fabric of one people. And so it was, for 28 years, until one person misspoke and spoke; stating everyone could pass through the wall. Just after that statement, many did. It took just one sentence to end the divide in a moment of confusion; becoming a new clarity of reunion. And the walls came down. In chunks, slices, fragments, blocks; falling away from the hearts of so many people. Spaciousness entered and expanded. It is expanding STILL.  

To find that clarity of expansion is to feel the beat of our hearts in movement and to know the barriers we create around its chambers. It is to sense the rhythmic surge of our own life force and to spend moments feeling the blocks we hold within each of our hearts. To let the blocks loosen into the pulsing rhythm so they can support that rhythm to its fullest potential is every person's task. Take a moment to feel the clarity of your heartbeat. Take another moment to sense a block of your own prejudice. Let the beat carry the block within and feel the newness of that relationship. This new sense of moving is the foundation of compassion. This new feel of support is the rhythm of PEACE.

Celebrating the way barriers, break apart to open hearts to new ways of being. An iconic fragment of the Berlin Wall in Simi Valley, CA-outside the Reagan Library. The butterfly soars towards the above of sky.  Take a moment to break down your walls, open your heart, and BREATHE.

See the speech writer's intention, developed at: http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2007/summer/berlin.html

In The Time Of Starry NIghts and Phrensied Days-Collected Births Emerge

The dog days of summer are upon us until approximately August 24th. In the large dog constellation, Sirius-the dog star rises, and to all of us befall "burning fevers, hysterics, and phrensies;" according to the Clavis Calendaria of 1813. So bright is the starlight, we become somewhat mad per ancient lore. Our gentle souls awaken and flare bright like the Perseid meteor shower in the night sky. We glow hot, and then cool with the shorter days. The heat of this time seems magnified in our current Western drought for the soil is parched. Everything is dry. It seems an unlikely time to plant and grow a project, yet I am planting one anyway, in community, with a hope of growth. 

I have begun an anthology project, suggested by a fellow author, on the process of how we become human. For some of us, it is at the time of our births. For others, it is the time of our near deaths or other moments of intense soul awakenings.  This project sprung out of the serial, nonfiction project called En Utero: Stories of the Womb, which won first prize for nonfiction work in March on the writing platform jukepop.com. I gave an update on this work for the 6 word memoir project hosted at SheWrites.com, stating I was: Birthing poetic womb stories, serial style. That statement birthed a request to do an anthology, so now there are 12 of us, along with a developing infant; working on themes of birth, conception, misconception, labor, delivery, partum and postpartum, adoption, miscarriage, gestation, birthdays, rebirth, transformations and other concepts. The sky's the limit here, so consider the topic possibilities as endless. 

Please join us in this work-whether you create in word, image, song, or even dance. If you're interested drop me a line in the comments section below, and I will share specifics about the project. You choose whether to opt in or opt out. The work will be shared among us and then perhaps, go public. You can opt out at any time along the way. 
Collected Births: An anthology of how we become human awaits You! Join in. You may like what you learn about yourself on your journey. The dog days of summer filled with phrensies is a great time to start.  

You can read and find En Utero:Stories of the Womb here: http://jukepop.com/home/read/1993.
In the meantime, you can see its amazing graphic cover design by Linnea Mielcarek and Leonardo da Vinci in the viewing pane on the right. 

Voice Emerging - Still Submerging

Years ago, I had a light and laughing voice. Then shame hit and blasted me into some state of petrified mortification. When my voice returned, it returned obsessively; reciting words repetitively late into the night, while my hand copied them over a page across hours.  Even snails could write faster.   My rhythm had been altered. I had lost the movement of my original expression after being shamed by a teacher. Years later, my voice emerged, abruptly with the coaxing of a master hypnotherapist and storyteller in a crowd of others. Its emergence shocked me to the core, so it took another few years before it came out again. Now it is almost impossible to stop.  Words come in floods and phrasing in snippets. It just keeps coming.

This is the true rhythm of birth, a surging flood of expansion and contraction with a great deal of breathing and tremendous push. This is how stories come into being and how they evolve a word at a time into books.  Creation is a labor of love and an act of faith-most necessarily in the self, the author of the work that is struggling to become.  Given this struggle, imagine my delight when I found a shareware tool that takes words from passages and turns them into textual images with a few taps on icons. Creation made simple in the form of a tagxedo.  I don't know whether I like the donate model or the actual product more-Donate to keep tagxedo free-the site says. So, I donated and made a tagxedo called The Bluebird of Happiness to put in a book project I am birthing.

I chose to tagxedo a poem called Soul Birth since the birth of my voice is the awakening of my soul. I wrote soul birth for doulas to chant aloud. May mothers, fathers, doctors, healers, family, and doulas all say some combination of these words to bless babies as they come into the world; heralding and inviting the arrival of the next generation of being.

Sending wild applause out to the creator/s of Tagxedo for giving us such delightful word salads.
Make your own creation here at: http://www.tagxedo.com/app.html

Moving Out of Stuck

Sometimes, we get stuck. In relationships with ourselves, with others, and with life. It reminds me of the sticky quality of biscuit dough, when it keeps gluing our fingers together, even after we wash them well. It takes a lot of scrubbing movement to free ourselves from the goo. In my case, the goo is a blend of my authentic experience coupled with some historical shame that has limited the use of my creativity.  So, I have begun the scrubbing movement of launching a creative project called Resume Box, which is a collaged box made from a recycled paper box and images that contains my original voice in resume form. I posted the box to show its current state, where it has been stuck for about 3 years. The intention was to place 3 of my original writings in the box, then put it out into community for others to add their written voices. It was planned as a collective work of healing and mastery. I was unsure of how to track its progress.  I could not guarantee that it would succeed or fail in attracting the participation or even the interest of others. I could not guarantee that any of the offerings would be read or relevant or even kept safe from plagiarism, theft, or inappropriate inclusions.  So, I decided that taking a risk is the better part of life, and I posted the start of the project here. 

My resume offerings will reflect some personal life experiences that include both a blessing and a curse from my childhood as well as a new beginning that expresses my voiced desire to seek a career in the ephemeral creative.  My hope is that others will place their creative writings as "resumes" in the box, that express in some way their desires to seek new ventures in their life. I would like the box to be passed hand to hand to encourage still others to drop their "resumes" in or simply read and consider, "Who it is" that we readers all truly want to be. I seek to invite original, creative writings that express hopes and desires in an authentic and safe way. I want the writings to be freely shared, original, honest, friendly, and considerate to reflect the heart's desires. I hope to launch the box soon and blog about its progress as a collective, community verse of hope and desire for meaningful lives. Just consider for a moment, if you will, Who it is that you really want to be!

Shouting Out: To Kat Kirby for fantastic teaching of a 13 layer collage process.
See her work at: http://2katstudios.com/